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Three individuals accused by US prosecutors of orchestrating a series of SIM-swap attacks have been linked to the $400 million hack of FTX that occurred just hours after the crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy.
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In a case filed on January 24 in the Washington DC District Court, US federal prosecutors charged Robert Powell, Carter Rohn, and Emily Hernandez with carrying out SIM-swap attacks and stealing the identities of 50 victims between March 2021 and April 2023.
Details of an attack on “Victim Company-1” are included in the filing, where Hernandez is alleged to have posed as an employee of the company on November 11 and 12, 2022, and Powell then gained access to AT&T accounts, accessed company accounts, and “transferred” over $400 million worth of cryptocurrency out of the crypto exchange’s wallets.
Blockchain security firm Elliptic said in a blog post on Thursday that “it seems likely that FTX is the ‘Victim Company-1’ referred to in the indictment,” since FTX’s crypto wallets had a large number of unauthorized transactions totaling around $400 million in the hours after the lawsuit was filed.
Bloomberg had reported (FTX)
A report by Bloomberg on Thursday cited two people familiar with the case who confirmed that the company named in the indictment is FTX.
Some of the funds were sent to the Kraken exchange shortly after the hack. Kraken’s chief security officer Nick Percoco at the time shared a post on Twitter stating that they were aware of the user’s identity.
Over the months, the exploiter wallets moved the funds through different bridges and blockchains in an attempt to launder the stolen crypto.
SIM swapping allows attackers to intercept multi-factor authentication codes used for login, and a number of high-profile crypto figures and projects have been successfully targeted in a series of attacks in December.
The agency, SEC, confirmed that an X account was also targeted in a SIM-swap attack. The attack happened after the exploiters made a fake post that the account had detected Bitcoin.
FTX CEO and restructuring chief John J. Ray III, upon taking over the post-bankruptcy exchange, claimed that the exchange’s security was “a complete mess” with a lack of proper systems, which likely made it a prime target for the SIM-swapping trio.
Powell, Rohn, and Hernandez have been charged with conspiracy to commit electronic fraud and aggravated identity theft.